Firewalls come in two standard types, stateful and stateless. Stateless firewalls check packets individually before deciding whether or not to permit them, while stateful firewalls are able to track movement of packets around the network, building profiles to better recognize safe and unsafe connections at the source., More specifically, firewalls can be distinguished in different ways like stateful firewalls, stateless firewalls, proxy firewalls, and packet filtering firewalls. Here, we’ll focus on understanding how stateless vs. stateful firewalls work, the pros and cons of each, specific use cases, and how they factor into the MSP’s role in cybersecurity., Stateful firewalls are capable of monitoring and detecting states of all traffic on a network to track and defend based on traffic patterns and flows. Stateless firewalls, however, only focus on individual packets, using preset rules to filter traffic. Firewalls provide critical protection for business systems and information., While both stateful and stateless firewalls act as security guards for your network, they work in fundamentally different ways. In this article, I’ll break down these differences in plain English and help you understand why a stateful firewall is the better choice for most users., What is a Stateless Firewall? A stateless firewall differs from a stateful one in that it doesn’t maintain an internal state from one packet to another. Instead, each packet is evaluated based on the data that it contains in its header. This enables the firewall to perform basic filtering of inbound and outbound connections., Stateful firewalls are the norm in most networks, but there are still times where a stateless firewall fits the bill. Learn how these firewalls work and what approach might be best. Firewalls protect a network by controlling incoming and outgoing traffic..